Justin Lantier-Novelli

Justin Lanier-Novelli was born in the Philadelphia area, attended Ohio University and now lives abroad teaching English to students in Asia and Europe. Hewrites young adult and middle grade novels and his articles have previously been published in the Courier Post, songplaces.com, and Global Living Magazine. @jlnovelli

Taking Up Space (November 25, 2016) I hunched over my laptop feverishly tapping the keys, penning my newest masterpiece for the screen; a masterpiece I knew full well would never see the light of day. Writing, or as I preferred to call it – composition, was my passion and I had used the better part of the last decade, struggling to make it my vocation. As such, I spent many hours, well above that of your average hipster, in cafes across thecountry. The odds of this script selling were a billion to one, yet I continued to create; to give birth to another underappreciated, literary work of art, years ahead of its time. Coffee shops always felt like home and I don’t mean that at all ironically – not more than your average hipster at any rate. So, when this girl I recently started dating – let’s be honest, sleeping with –joined me one afternoon, I thought nothing of it. Just two people relaxing and sipping our decaf nonfat soy chai lattes. Okay, so that’s what I ordered; she takes her coffee black. I’m in my early thirties however, have always preferred to date – again, sleep with – women in their early to mid-twenties. So what? Yeh, yeh, you think I’m an asshole. Get over it. There’s something tobe said for the smooth, firm skin women around twenty-two have… better than gold. I suppose it goes back to my puberty years. I can remember, like it happened yesterday, my mother dragging me into the low-end department store at the mall, my nine-year-old sister in tow. She’d stride right over to the cute teenager behind the counter in the boys’ junior section. “Excuse me, where are your husky sizes?” Husky. A word I quickly learned to loathe as a pre-teen. Invariably, the clerk – who I’d already placed on a high pedestal because of her physical beauty – looked at me with disdain as she eyed me up anddown. She’d then nod or point to the dark corner of the store where the lone light source flickered and buzzed. I’d sigh heavily and trudge off to try on pair after pair of jeans, hoping that if I could actually squeeze into a 32 inch waist that meant I was truly only a 32 inch waist. To be honest, I was a 36 inch waste of space and I knew it. “Thanks, Mom,” I thought, but never dared speak aloud, “Might as well tattoo the word FAT across my forehead.” The next Monday in school, I’d show up in my new jeans to be mocked. Booty-chokers. That’s what they called them. Rump Wranglers. Highwaters. I was an overweight preteen. The pedestal I had put women like the clerk, and other girls in my grade, on for years would become an unattainable goal; Aphrodite or Venus or whatever you’d like to call your perfect dream woman, didn’t exist. At twelve years old, however, I would’ve never guessed as much. Which brings us full circle up to the present and helps explain why, when I hit a growth spurt and slimmed out a bit after high school, I began to garner the attention of pedestal quality babes – like this afternoon’s companion. So, I’m in the middle of a thought, typing away on a really cracking line of dialog, when Sam – let’s call her Sam – interrupted me for the third time that sentence. She wasn’t letting me get a single pagewritten. This day was quickly becoming a colossal waste of time. I acknowledged her mundane observation and pressed on. After about the tenth interruption though, and fearing I couldn’t take much more, I took a deep breath and slowly shut the laptop lid, interlaced my fingers politely on top of the device, and smiled at her. “What would you like to talk about?” She shrugged. “Whatever.” A brilliant conversationalist. Not her fault, mind you – raised by a pair of white-bred, Bible-toting, conservative, middle-class capitalists. She graduated from her small town high school with a 2.4 GPA and now, found herselfin the process of transferring from a pathetic, two-year community college to an equally pathetic, division three, liberal-arts school in the rural Pennsylvania Poconos. Her major? Who the hell knows. ArtHistory, Elementary Education, or perhaps even Feline Behavior and Psychology.

Truthfully, her goal wasn’t any B.A. degree. Like thousands of young women across the country (mostly from the south, but you’d be surprised), she was in college to get her M.R.S. degree. Husbandhunters attend school for the sole purpose of slutting themselves up nightly to snare a pre-med or pre-law major – a partner who had the earning potential to support a lifetime of overindulgent shoppinghabits. Good thing I’m not marriage material – according to Sam and the slew that came before her. As a starving artist, my lack of income had become a serious deterrent for any females, like Sam, to consider as a viable mating option… not in a billion years. They’d actually stop themselves from falling in love with me before the relationship got out of hand. The size of a man’s investment portfolio is more of apriority than the size of his cock, regardless of how well he might handle it. I laugh about it, but without a six-figure income, no amount of sexual enjoyment or even sweet, romantic chivalry could land a socially accepted beauty like Sam. It’s not really her fault; it’s society.Expectations are far too high. I’m happy to resign myself to be her flavor of the week – and her mine. I wasn’t missing out on much, she wasn’t really my type either. Girls like her know the drill. Hell,they invented the drill; so, before you go chastising or persecuting me, relax. She’s gonna be just fine when this is all over. I stared at her blank, thoughtless expression as she primped her hair and adjusted her cleavage using her smartphone camera as a mirror. Gravity had yet to affect her beautiful pair of perky tits as theybuoyed from the camisole she wore – two sizes too small. If Victoria had a secret, girls like Sam didn’t bother to keep it to themselves. They told anybody who asked. Everybody, actually. With a resigned sigh, I finally said, “There’s a launch today.” She peeked around her phone, confusion plastered across her expression. “A launch?” “Yeah,” I said. “To the International Space Station.” “What’s a space station?”You got to be kidding me. “Seriously? You don’t know what a space station is?” She shrugged again. “Where is it?”Lake Okeechobee. Good God. “It’s in space,” I said, out loud. She craned her neck over my head to gaze into the sky through the café window. “You mean like, up there?”Yes, goddammit, Sam. Up fucking there. “Yep.” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” “What do you mean you don’t think so?” A chuckle spurted out. Her eyes narrowed. I knew she hated being laughed at. She couldn’t stand when people treated her like a mental patient. Maybe if she cracked a book once in a while… “It’s there. I promise.” I widened my eyes mid-roll.Unbelievable. “What’s a space station do?” “It doesn’t do anything,” I said. “It’s just there. It’s an orbiting research facility. Astronauts live up there for a year or two so they can study the cosmos.” “Who’s Cosmos? That guy from Seinfeld?”She doesn’t know the space station, but she knows Kramer’s first name? “No that’s Cosmo.” That sitcom ended before she was even in middle school; must have caught it on syndication, I suppose. “Why do we need a space station? There are enough problems down here.” “Well, for starters the space program has led to many developments that make our lives easier. But more importantly, we travel into space because it’s the next step. It’s the same reason Columbus discovered the new world or Lewis and Clark hiked to the Pacific Ocean. Manifest Destiny.” “Lewis and Clark… Isn’t that just a show about Superman? I remember it from when I was a kid.” Lois and Clark – mediocre show from the 90s. See? She knew a few things – like the stuff The Powers That Be aired on the idiot box. That’s what my grandmother used to call it: the Idiot Box. In Sam’scase, the term Boob Tube more accurately applied. I’m willing to bet she didn’t realize Superman was a comic book from the 1930s. But because she saw something on television… As a writer, I have to say – that really irks me. One of my professors used to tell me the only three things that change you are the people you meet, the places you go, and the books you read. An entiregeneration of Cinderellas looking for their handout. And the glass factory’s been shut down because those same Powers That Be outsourced production to China. Yep. Sam, and millions of girls and boys like her, definitely would’ve benefited from cracking a book once in a while. She probably never even read Cinderella. She didn’t know what a space station was! If Hollywood made a movie or television show about it, I guaran-fucking-tee you, Sam would be a fucking expert. I reeled myself back into the conversation. “Thescientists who travel to the station are studying the origins of the universe.” Oh, I heard the words come out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them. I hated making mistakes, let alone the same mistake more than once and this one, I’d made before… the “Intelligent Design” can of worms. That was the one freaking book Sam opened, and she opened it quite often. When I was her age, I’d wax intellectual with my friends about a plethora of philosophical topics: time travel, alien life forms, theology, and string bikinis. “Psh, I know all about the origins of the universe and I don’t need no space station to tell me different. In the beginning…” And she proceeded to quote the entire first verse in the book of Genesis. Like everyone else in the Western world, I knew it already; however, she felt it bore repeating. Again. It didn’t. “I’m not suggesting God didn’t create the universe.” I attempted to placate her inner WASP before we delved any deeper into this inevitable argument. If I let things cross the line, getting her annoyed, I could kiss any action later goodbye. That was unacceptable. However, imprisoned by my obsession to prove other people wrong and mesmerized by her curled upper lip, I couldn’t help myself. “But…wouldn’t it be cool to figure out how He did it?” “We don’t need to know. We aren’t God. We’re made in His image, but we’re only human,” she said. “The Bible teaches us everything we need to know. Your precious space station only takes up space.” Oh, I know all about things in the world that only take up space. Husky size space. “If science was able to prove the existence of a divine creator – of God,” I began, “You wouldn’t, in the slightest, be interested in hearing the answers?” She shook her head. “I have all the answers I need.” “Bullshit.” The problem with fundamentalist evangelicals is they’re far too preoccupied worshipping the invisible parent figure seated on a golden throne in the clouds – shaking his finger at us – thanlearning about the universe around them. “The Lord created the world in six days,” she said. “And that was only a few thousand years ago.” And, there it is. Houston, we have a problem. I opened my laptop and Googled pictures of nebulae and galaxies taken with the Webb Space Telescope. “If the universe was made for man, and man was made to rule it, then how can you explain the millions of stars and planets that exist light years from earth?” She stared at me, unblinking. “You get what I’m saying? If it weren’t for the space station, these photos wouldn’t exist. Mankind would have no knowledge that anything is even, ‘up there’.” She rolled her eyes. “Next, you’re gonna tell me humans evolved from monkeys.” A text message came through on her phone, diverting her attention like a kitten to a shiny object. As I shook my head, returning to my screenplay, I abandoned the mission. I couldn’t handle that debate again. Yes, Sam. We evolved from monkeys and gorillas and all manner of primates. And you know what? God did it! It was all his doing! Your omnipotent father figure set the wheels in motion billions of years ago and one day POOF, mankind evolved from gorillas.

I heard her phone slap against the table. She was waiting for me to say something. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else.” “I’m hungry,” she said. “Think I’ll have a banana.”